Evgeny Zamyatin’s We as Psychological Novel: Change of Protagonist and the Theme of Double

This thesis is an attempt to interpret Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, which was evaluated only as utopian literature and dystopian literature, with a new reading method. In terms of genre, this work is a text of a very complex and interesting phenomenon. In We, genre experimentation is done to the extreme. Wearing a utopia envelope, if you look closely, the genre elements of love novels, adventure novels, and psychological novels are organically intertwined with each other, and they have a structure that ultimately leads to a philosophical novel. Therefore, the expansion and deepening of the genre structure interpretation provides decisive moments in the interpretation of We. The reason is that this text is not simply a combination of several genre elements, but has an organic complex genre structure that allows in-depth interpretation of this text only by applying the framework of various genre structures. The important point in this context is that the interrelationships between genres do not proceed in parallel within this text, but rather organically as one genre flows out of another. The most basic genre structure in We as such a complex genre is the metafiction genre. We is a novel about writing novels, and the characteristic of this genre determines the basic narrative structure of this work. However, in the process of creating an epic poem, an unexpected transformation of the protagonist, that is, from a mathematician to a poet, occurs. This transformation process causes the main character’s ontological confusion and is accompanied by psychological agitation and pain. And the psychological confusion of the protagonist is now the main driving force for the novel. The literary expression of the confusion appears in the theme of the alter ego. And in the theme, various light motifs to represent the confusion of the main character constitute the semantic structure. This thesis aims to identify the in-depth semantic structure of this work by classifying the complex psychological novel devices in We.